Is the Star Wars gaming franchise doomed?

When Disney bought the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas and LucasArts, a lot of fans were grieved as the announcement came that all games currently being developed by LucasArts would be cancelled with immediate effect. While not all the Star Wars games were great, there were some standouts that really immersed you in the complex fantasy world of The Force.

Now, however, it has been announced by Disney that they have signed a multi-year agreement with Electronic Arts that will mean the future Star Wars games will exclusively be developed and published by EA. We don’t have definite facts on the value of this agreement, but suffice to say it will be a large sum. EA’s reputation has been marred lately because of the always connected DRM approach, causing massive problems with games like SimCity. Many fans have already signed the death warrant for their beloved Star Wars gaming franchise because of these problems at EA.

That being said, they are in talks with some major developers to create the newest generation of Star Wars content driven games. Developers scheduled to take on the challenge are the likes of DICE (creator of Battlefield), Visceral (creator of Dead Space) and BioWare, who will continue development on the Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic it has already released.

EA will create games for a “core gaming audience” while Disney will create the casual titles for social gaming and for mobile. I don’t know about the Star Wars fans out there, but personally I would love to see a new instalment in the Knights of the Old Republic franchise.